Mechanical Stuff

What are we taking from which system?

Fudge skills – each player can name their skills as desired, committee-decided cost for any given skill based on the fudge tables.

Suggested skill list from Shadowrun and DFRPG as a jumping off point

Fudge gifts rather than fate stunts (gifts are basically a superset of stunts)

Fudge faults are allowed

Money as just currency rather than a skill (50k starting newyen and 50k more per broad skill point spent.)

Character Creation

Basically DFRPG, with the “Up to your chest” power level (8 refresh, skill cap at superb)

The DFRPG templates are all available as options, with their associated stunts (gifts) and costs.

Do true mortals work in this setting? I think they work just fine – they have no inherent supernatural stuff going on, but just like DFRPG, they get an extra 2 refresh to play with.

Gear

Items are game artifacts in the same class as players.

We want a function to convert these game artifacts into price

Weapons have stats as needed:

Damage is a minimum number of stress caused by a successful hit. Shifts above the damage number add to the damage.

Range is how many zones away it can affect. Minimum range is an option for some weapons if needed (RPGs, sniper rifles, etc.)

Explosives and similar weapons can have an aspect called “Area #”, where # is the number of zones the attack effects. (rule of thumb is 1/3 damage per zone from the origin.)

Accuracy is handled with aspects as needed (accurate, inaccurate and none being the default, other toys like scopes could be added for extra cost.)

Armor

Option 1: Armor is an amount of stress subtracted from incoming hits. A defense roll that generates shifts above the armor rating subtracts the additional shifts as well.

Option 2: Armor has stress boxes that have to be gotten through before damaging the wearer. (Or the wearer can decide to use the armor’s stress, like consequences, to deflect damage that would otherwise hit their own stress track)

Armor rating is a penalty to athletics

Utility gear:

If the gear has a skill the gear can roll that skill to create advantage for a player.

Gear can not roll its own skills (except for rolling to passively resist damage/hexing) for other purposes unless it has the agent unusual background, cost 1 gift

How does magic and tech interact?

Magic users have a skill (or multiple, like fire magic and air magic) for casting (could be a single broad skill if the PC don’t want to get into the details.)

Cyberware has a “magic resistance” rating – you need gear with a resistance at least as high as your highest magic skill

if the ’ware rating is lower than your highest magic skill, your magic rolls take the difference as a penalty.

Hexing?

Practitioners can still deliberately hex technology, as explained in DFRPG

Accidental hexing only happens when in direct contact with technology while working magic

Accidental hexing can manifest in really weird ways via AR and VR

Accidental hexing is handled as a compel.

We should have some kind of scale or guideline for how high-tech something needs to be before accidental hexing becomes a concern. Honestly, I think group consensus is enough, here, but a magic resistance stat is one possibility.

Who can get cyberware?

Metahumans and physiological equivalents are easy (white court, for example) – they don’t need any additional gifts to qualify for cyberware.

Non-metahumans are harder (fae, for example) – in order to get ’ware, they need a 1 gift unusual background, such as “knows a cyberware expert”.

these can be updated after purchase if the device has the modular gift

a device with a hardware accelerated encryption can decrypt information from the same level or lower device in real time. Other wise decrytpion takes 10^(n – 1) months where n is the non-zero delta between the encryptor and decryptor assuming the cypher is known.

multiple computers can be clustered as per the unwired rules

the device can have aspects that can negate negative aspects from software

Software

the OS program is required and likely specific to the device. In may cases it can not be changed.

each program has a robustness and security rating, in addition to one gift, skill or positive aspect. Software may also add zero or more negative aspects.

software can add skills (see the utility gear above)

software can also be used to add the agent gift

the number of programs is limited to the processing power skill

security software can target specific software on a device that the device that the security program is running on can decrypt in real time

software can be copied freely unless it has the DRM fault. (This will be a fairly common fault in Shadowrun.)

software can be device or manufacturer specific

Situationist

We generate specific chip-sets, architectures and ecosystems as game artifacts with the necessary faults to simulate exclusion and inclusion between vendors and ecosystems

We build devices from within these ecosystems

We take a similar approach to software

We create an exploit ecosystem based on the software and hardware ecosystems, which should include rules around undisclosed exploits

I think my preference is more or less the “Simple hardware, complex software” option. That seems to have plenty of moving parts to play with, without getting overly complicated. -Br